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Comment by nadam | Hacker News Reader

"I don't know the Chinese culture well enough (assuming Yinghai is from China), but I am under the impression that they would emphasize more on results (fix the problem) than on processes (understand why the fix works, in order to be sure we are not breaking something else)."

The greatest living mathematician has Chinese origins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

If someone 'thinks and analyzes problems' then he does.

I don't like categorization by nation because I am Hungarian and I am afraid a lot of people in the U.S. who don't know me yet thinks something entirely different of my problem solving style than reality.

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While Terrence was of Chinese origin, he certainly did not grow up imbued in the Chinese culture. He was more of an Australian. I not saying this to imply Chinese are not deep thinkers. I have worked with Chinese (China bred) engineers who are damn good thinkers. So it is just a matter of personal style and priority(influenced at times by the culture one grows in).

Of course, any nation is able to produce any kind of individual.

I'm a great believer in cultural traits, and I think they are normal. We are not all identical, and we are not all totally randomly different. We all share some cultural background from the country we grew up in, in varying degrees, and it does not prevent any individual from having any specific ability.

Yet, I was wrong to try to correlate a specific behavior of a specific person to his/her culture. That's where my logic was flawed.

If anyone wants more insight on cultural differences, I really recommend "When Cultures Collide" from Richard Lewis, it's a great book.

When I think of Hungarian problem solving I think of Polya's renowned book on proof heuristics, "How to Solve It"[1]. How accurate is that impression?

[1] http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html

Quite close.:) I've read that book when I was a child.:) I've had some math influence, and I had the luck to be the student of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajos_P%C3%B3sa_(mathematician) when I was 13 years old.

When I think "Hungarian problem solving" the first association that comes up is John Von Neumann.

What assumptions do you normally encounter?

I think there is a generic implicit assumption that programmers in less rich countries are lower quality. Of course it is rarely said explicitly but it can be seen from some signs: salaries are so much lower here that I cannot see any other reason why not more development work comes here. When companies do offshoring they bring here only the boring job which does not need much creativity, etc...

Funny, I think Paul Erdős.

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